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VOL. 9, NO. 1 
SPRING 2020 

 

EDITORIAL 

Arts Entrepreneurship Internationally and in the Age of 
COVID- 

Paul Bonin-Rodriguez 
University of Texas at Austin 

Neville Vakharia 
Drexel University 

What brings the two halves of our expanded, double issue together, other than rigorous schol-
arship and shared commitment to our growing field, is this moment of crisis and change. Dur-
ing our editorial process, the world went into quarantine, and like many arts scholars we found 
ourselves asking how the journal’s field-building aims would contribute to the resilience of arts 
organizations facing unparalleled crisis. Dance studies and arts policy scholar Sarah Wilbur 
writes eloquently of the challenges facing her as a professor for in an op-ed for Duke University 
Arts1: 

My biggest challenge, honestly, was trying to avoid showing my own sense of devastation in 
seminar about the dire and still-changing statistics on the US cultural workforce under COVID-
19. We already know: 30 percent of museums that have closed will not reopen2; a projected $4.5 

 
1 Wilbur, S. (2020). "It's Hard to Stay Optimistic." Duke Arts. https://arts.duke.edu/news/sarah-wilbur-it-is-
hard-to-stay-optimistic/. 
2 Merritt, Elizabeth (2020). “Three New Scenarios for Financial Survival in 2020.” Center for the Future of Mu-
seums Blog.  https://www.aam-us.org/2020/04/13/three-new-scenarios-for-financial-survival-in-2020/. 



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4 

billion in losses among arts nonprofits is expected in the next fiscal year3; and institutions are 
laying off cultural workers4 and implementing pay cuts. In the performing arts, widespread can-
cellations, residency deferrals, and contractual defaults are leaving the majority of gigging artists 
more unemployed than ever. 

Wilbur continues by offering caution towards “a celebratory stance toward the adaptive 
resiliency of artists amidst the mass estrangement and economic losses of the present” and cred-
its her concern to the high risk of exploitation of creative resilience at play right now under 
COVID conditions of production. 

Arts entrepreneurship has been written about in this journal as a source of resilience, opti-
mization, and opportunity creation in its winter 2015, summer 2015, and summer 2016 issues. 
Wilbur’s ambivalence points to tasks remaining before us, tasks that span a broad variety of 
practices and interdisciplinary fields.  

Seeking to gain timely responses to the current crisis, we reached out to a variety of scholars 
working in the arts and arts entrepreneurship and asked them to comment on the future of our 
field. In a piece that she posted on her blog, Creative Infrastructure (“A COVID-19 Prompt from 
Artivate”)5, founding editor Linda Essig, dean of arts and letters at California State, Los Angeles, 
observes that the current rescue efforts being made by the US government—”direct payments; 
expanded unemployment insurance; and paid sick leave”—offer clear testimony that “collective 
social action is a more effective and efficient way to achieve human well-being than market-
based exchanges.” Speaking specifically to the arts, Essig continues with a hopeful note with 
respect to equity in the cultural economy:  

The other thing we see happening in the short term is a reliance on artists and their irreplaceable 
unique creative products to help humanity through this crisis through music, media streaming, 
literary arts, and online galleries. We are living without sports but not without the content avail-
able on Netflix or Hulu. If my first hope is fulfilled, my second hope is that people will connect 
the value they are finding in the arts with the value they are finding in collective social action to 
build economic and social structures that support the arts and artists. We need to heed Arlene 
Goldbard’s (and others’) calls for a “Works Progress Administration for the Arts,”6 but in a way 
that does not take us back to the 1930s but instead moves us forward to the other side of neolib-
eral capitalism. I don’t presume to know what that will look like, but I am hopeful that it will 
look better for artists tomorrow than it did yesterday. 

 
3 Dafoe, Taylor (2020). “The Coronavirus Pandemic Has Costs American Arts Organizations an Estimated $4.5 
Billion So Far, a New Study Claims.” Artnet News. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/arts-organizations-lost-4-
5-billion-pandemic-says-ambitious-new-study-1829262. 
4 Jacobs, Julia (2020), “Natural History Museum Slashing Staff with Layoffs and Furloughs. The New York 
Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/arts/design/natural-history-layoffs-virus.html. 
5 Essig, Linda (2020). “A Covid Prompt from Artivate.” Creative Infrastructure. https://creativeinfrastruc-
ture.org/2020/04/04/a-covid-19-prompt-from-artivate/. 
6 Essig, Linda (2011). “What Paul Krugman and Arlene Goldbard Have in Common.” Creative Infrastructure. 
https://creativeinfrastructure.org/2011/01/04/what-paul-krugman-and-arlene-goldbard-have-in-common/. 



ARTIVATE 9.1 

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In “The Unspoken Cost and Future Loss of Quarantainment,” Scott Blackshire, curator for 
the Tobin Collection of Theater Arts at the McNay Art Museum, uses a portmanteau to de-
scribe, like Essig, the avidness with which performers have stepped up to maintain content, even 
before the details are worked out:  

Social distancing—the current hallmark of good citizenship—positions artists to utilize technol-
ogy to reach audiences that are clamoring en masse, searching the web for their quaran-
tainment. Artists respond to their deafening demands, and work—mostly for free—to present 
captivating, profound, and hilarious performances that exude emotional complexity in spite of 
stark online environments—like that of the Dafne string quartet broadcast from an empty 
Teatro la Fenice in Venice; or an actor’s short-form, improvised performance/online birthday 
party; or the #stayathome edition of Saturday Night Live. Pandemic notwithstanding, working 
for free is not sustainable. Messages supporting professional artists heard above the louder-than-
usual online din during this crisis are buoyed by values and beliefs that mirror artists’ needs. 
Cindy Sadler, a classical vocalist, teacher, and entrepreneurship mentor, reminds clients and 
social media followers that artists need money. She urges audiences to offer donations for the 
ever-growing number of free online performances. Professor, author, and playwright Lisa B. 
Thompson is a supporter of artists’ unions. Her work reminds artists to question social and 
institutional values and be mindful of economic inequities. A more spirited perspective on the 
COVID-19 state of the arts comes from actor and graduate student Roberto di Donato. He gives 
a cerebral take. “I’ve fully dove into chaotic thinking, and I feel more drawn to alternative 
thought,” he shared. Also, “I started giving less shits.” Assuredly spoken, but despite giving less 
shits he’ll still need money. So, Less Shits/More Money—a roadmap, for all in need of a new, 
postpandemic path, worth consideration.  

Diane Ragsdale, assistant professor and program director for arts management and entre-
preneurship in the College of Performing Arts at the New School, titles her piece “What are we 
noticing?” to introduce a mindful entrepreneurial mindset to guide our way forward: 

In a short video, “Atlas of Creative Tools”7, made available online in late March 2020, cho-
reographer, educator, and sage Liz Lerman discusses cultivating what she calls a “toolbox men-
tality”—your own set of ways of working. She differentiates two approaches to building a 
toolbox using a swimming metaphor: 

I can teach you how to swim. We can walk slowly into the pool. And we can start 
practicing our breathing. And then we can practice our arm movements and practice our 
kicking. We do all the stuff to become good swimmers. Working from the shallow end into 
a point where you’re suddenly in the deep end and you’re swimming. That’s one way to 
think about a toolbox.  

But a toolbox mentality would be something like this. I’d throw you in the deep end. 
And you don’t know how to swim. You would start thrashing around. You might notice 

 
7 Lerman, Liz. “An Atlas of Creative Tools: 3 Samples.” https://vimeo.com/300088026. 



ARTIVATE 9.1 

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that if you cup your hands you can keep your head up longer. . . . You might notice if you 
add your legs you can keep your head above water. You might even notice that keeping 
your head above water is a good idea.  

This is really how the toolbox mentality works. It’s you noticing.  
You’re in the deep end.  
Things are happening.  
You’re surviving.  
How is that possible? 

Lerman’s point: it’s the noticing that is important.  
In response to COVID-19 already one can see different toolboxes emerging—different sur-

vival strategies that expose not only radically different value systems and purposes but radically 
different proximity to extinction. This crisis is giving us the opportunity to see our sector with 
new eyes. As Rebecca Solnit wrote in an article for the Guardian published on April 7, 2020: 

A disaster (which originally meant “ill-starred”, or “under a bad star”) changes the world 
and our view of it. Our focus shifts, and what matters shifts. What is weak breaks under 
new pressure, what is strong holds, and what was hidden emerges.8  

Over the coming days, weeks, and months, this pandemic will reveal the weak, strong, and 
hidden in our arts and culture ecosystems. Moreover, in the struggle to survive, we are likely 
going to see hundreds if not thousands of different toolboxes emerge—from artists, organiza-
tions, funders, cities, service organizations, and states. If we are courageous and smart, we are 
going to notice: 

• What is collapsing, what has structural integrity, and what invisible beauty or harm is 
being revealed? 

• Who or what are we stewarding and protecting? Who or what are we leaving behind?  
• Which newly emerging practices and structures are keeping us alive for now but are 

not sustainable? And which hold the potential to make us far more resilient and rele-
vant in the future? 

Ragsdale’s call is ultimately optimistic with respect to resilience and capacity of arts entrepre-
neurs to build a new future.  

At the University of Michigan Ashley Lucas, associate professor of theatre arts and drama 
and director of the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), points to the challenges remaining for 
artists working at the intersection of arts and prison abolition and social justice more broadly. 
While not explicitly about the field of arts entrepreneurship, her work points to the once-vibrant 
and still-vital projects where artists, both leading and participating, have been transformative 

 
8 Solnit, Rebecca (2020). “The Impossible Has Already Happened: What Coronavirus Can Teach Us About 
Hope.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/07/what-coronavirus-can-teach-us-
about-hope-rebecca-solnit. 



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and are still very much needed:  

I spent the last seven years traveling to ten different countries to see as much theatre in prisons 
as I could. My forthcoming book Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration (Methuen 
Drama, September 2020) describes the remarkable, diverse, and inspiring work that I witnessed 
inside places that are meant to flatten out people’s individuality and free will. In spite of the 
myriad and overwhelming challenges that they faced, the incarcerated people that I met found 
ways to make really great performances. They also used the theatre as a means to accomplish 
other things, like building community, developing professional skills, creating social change, 
and maintaining hope as a means of survival. Now in the COVID-19 pandemic, incarcerated 
theatre makers face new and even more daunting challenges. Prisons throughout the US and 
many other parts of the world are quarantined. All programming inside the walls has ceased. 
Even so, social distancing in prisons is impossible. Testing for the virus happens sporadically 
and in limited numbers. In all prisons—especially those with severe overcrowding—the disease 
spreads like wildfire, killing prison staff and incarcerated people alike. No one is allowed to make 
theatre under the present conditions, and when the prisons are closed to outsiders, most of us 
who offer programming in prisons have either very limited or no contact with the incarcerated 
folks with whom we work. No one knows when we might be able to enter the prisons again, 
much less restart rehearsals and theatre workshops. Like people with incarcerated loved ones all 
over the world, we wait and pray. Those who survive will have much to say about what the pan-
demic has taught us. This crisis makes plain things we already knew—that prisons have always 
been public health disasters, that caging people diminishes public safety, that concentrating 
things like disease and violence on a captive population inevitably results in those things radiat-
ing out into the rest of society. The Cook County Jail in Chicago and Parnall Correctional Fa-
cility in Jackson, Michigan, have now been cited as the two largest institutional epicenters for 
COVID-19 in the US, as the disease ravages the incarcerated populations and travels outside the 
walls on the backs of the staff who enter and leave daily. We in the theatre—incarcerated or 
not—have been trained to bear witness and to tell stories of what we know and what we hope 
the world could be. The theatre makers trapped inside the walls during this pandemic nightmare 
have much to teach us, and those of us who are their allies in the free world must do all we can 
to make sure that others can see and hear what the folks inside have to offer to all humanity. 
When at last the gates open again, we should be standing at the ready to welcome our sisters and 
brothers home or to go inside and begin devising new plays. As Boal taught us, we should begin 
rehearsing for a better future, yet again. 

As all of these responses indicate, our way forward will be complex. Much remains to be 
witnessed and experienced, theorized and researched, organized and advocated for, as well as 
reflected upon and written about, and we remain committed to interrogating how arts entre-
preneurship can better serve its vast field. 

 
 

  



 

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